Former senior CIA officer Jose Rodriguez should be in prison instead of writing op-eds in the Washington Post. As he freely admits in his first paragraph, he was our torturer-in-chief during the Bush-Cheney era. He ought to be explaining why he paid $10 million to Pakistan for Abu Zabaydah and then tortured him mercilessly, when Abu Zabaydah didn’t even get along with al-Qaeda and basically arranged travel plans for a rival extremist organization. Why did Rodriguez’s terror-hunting operation think Abu Zabaydah was bin-Laden’s right-hand man? Why did they think he was involved in the African Embassy bombings? Why did they think he was involved in the millennial LAX bomb plot?
Rodriguez was not only morally depraved and sadistic, he was also incredibly incompetent. Nowhere in his piece does he give us one shred of evidence that his torture ever helped us catch anyone or solve any puzzle. He simply insists that this happened. What else is he going to say?
I’m surprised that he even brings Zubaydah’s name up since his case is one that brings only humiliation and dishonor upon himself. And he presents his defense as if Zubaydah’s was the only one he tortured. That’s not even close to being the case (Red Cross pdf). And, of course, once the CIA began to torture people, the practice expanded into the military and resulted in multiple deaths.
Rodriguez asks us to consider the context within which he made the decision to torture people. I’ve considered the context. So have tens of millions of other people. We’ve concluded that Rodriguez is a monster.
Rodriguez tells us that his torture saved lives. An exhaustive report by the incredibly CIA-friendly (until quite recently) Senate Intelligence Committee concludes otherwise.
Rodriguez asks us to remember that the “program was approved at the highest levels of the government, judged legal by the Justice Department and regularly briefed to the leaders of our congressional oversight committees.” That last part is a lie. The briefings were misleading and self-serving. As to the first two parts, we know, and that’s why we think the Bush administration was a monstrous abomination.
That the guy is real might be the scariest thing of all. He sounds like the villain in a bad knockoff of a James Bond movie.
And, as Professor Pierce says, the bastards did it in our name.
Talk about “take our country back….”
Well, that’s one of the reasons. For a full list of the categories, send me a self-addressed, stamped crate.
This is irrelevant:
Torture is illegal. A legal prohibition because there are far too many morally and ethically deficient people in the world such as Rodriquez, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and GWB.
Stop looking backward. We need to look forward.
We are neither going to be able to get a good look forward nor achieve any real forward motion until we begin to clean up the mistakes of the country over the last 50 years.
We have become a criminal conspiracy operating under cover of “democracy.” Until we clean the filthy Augean stables of Washington DC…including the hidden basement areas where the security state plies its dark wares…we will continue to stink up the world. Eventually we will go down under the sheer weight of the horseshit that we are now carrying. Clean up the murderers, torturers and thieves and things will begin to get better. Don’t do that and they will remain in power no matter who the frontman appears to be.
If even one gets taken down it will put the fear of God into the rest of them Two? Three? Four? The conspiracy will break.
Until then?
Nada.
Bet on it.
AG
Yes. Keep reminding people BooMan.
And then there’s John Yoo. And a judge named Bybee.
Prison is far too civilized for these walking trashbags.
When you buy an expensive toy, you want to play with it a lot.